Wednesday, September 02, 2015

WEP Is One of the Reasons I Will NEVER Be Able To Retire

Lots of luck getting this idiot Congress to EVER repeal those ruinous offsets.

It does not matter how small your state pension is if you are in a state or work for an agency that does not pay into Social Security:

Most people rely on the statements that the Social Security Administration publishes every year estimating your future retirement benefits. DO NOT DO THAT. If you get a public pension, no matter how small, your Social Security benefit earned from other work can be reduced by an amount up to half the amount of your public pension! This has a huge effect on multi-career people! Most people lose $400 or more a month, but the amount can be much more.

I will lose up to $150 a month in Social Security because I was covered a mere five years in Nevada PERS. I won't have much more than 1K in SS and PERS combined when I am forced to take SS at age 62 in about a year and a half because I am not working full time. I will get less SS than my sister does who got her first husband's benefit, and I had to work all my life and cannot get a spousal benefit. The offset will be likely around $100 if I calculated my SS benefit right because I have more than 20 years in "substantial earnings." That "substantial earnings" is what kills people who are in education. I am working now, but because it is part time, SS doesn't recognize it. Even if I were a full-time classified employee for the duration of the school year, it STILL doesn't count because the yearly income is under 21K.

Those offsets are designed to screw over lower-paid public employees in general and education personnel in particular.

An online petition, one of those that is always ignored by elected officials, is here. Note the number of signers.

Even if there were a million signatures, the idiots in Congress would ignore it.